Should you visit Interior Design Trade Shows when you’re renovating?
If you’re renovating your home, your Instagram or Pinterest feeds may make it feel as though there’s a whole world of interior design you’re supposed to be keeping up with.
Right now, you might be seeing designers, stylists and interiors accounts you follow sharing their trips to Decorex, Focus at Chelsea Harbour and London Design Festival. There are beautiful new fabrics, furniture collections, lighting, makers and brands everywhere you look.
you could be wondering: should I be doing this too?
Should you be visiting the trade shows? Discovering new brands? Saving the latest collections? Keeping an eye on what’s ‘in’?
Our answer, particularly if you’re working with an interior designer, is: not necessarily.
By all means, go if you love it. Trade shows can be a wonderfully inspiring day out. Grab a coffee and look for sparks of inspiration. You might see a colour combination that stops you in your tracks, discover a fabric you love or stumble across a piece that feels completely “you”.
But you don't need to become an expert in the interior design industry just because you're renovating your home.
In our decade of visiting them, what we’ve discovered is that trade fairs can be incredibly overwhelming. Even as designers, we sometimes need a few days in a dark room afterwards.
It might seem that seeing more will help you make decisions, but the flip side is that hundreds of brands and products competing for your attention can lead to decision paralysis. You went looking for a sofa and suddenly you’re questioning everything. You might come home with a phone full of things you loved but somehow finding the cohesion feels harder than ever.
These shows are designed to showcase something for every style, taste and type of home. The trick is knowing what will actually work for your home, which is surprisingly difficult when everything is shiny, exciting and demanding your attention.
That’s our job.
We spend the year visiting shows, meeting designers, makers and suppliers, looking at new collections and keeping an eye on what’s emerging. We’re less interested in what’s simply ‘trending’ in 2026 and more interested in what will still feel right in your home five, ten or even twenty years from now. We go to trade shows so that when we’re working on a new project we can think “ah yes, we know exactly the right fabric style for this room” or “we know just the lighting designer for this”.
In short, we do the legwork so that you don’t have to. And, most importantly, we filter it all through the lens of your home.
what should you bring to the first conversation?
You don’t need a list of brands. You don’t need a moodboard with every room already worked out. You don't need to have visited any shows.
Instead, bring us the things you really love. The things that make you think “I simply can’t get this out of my head”.
Here’s some examples of the things we’ve been shown as inspiration for projects we’ve worked on:
The roses in the garden outside a cottage sitting room
A Pinterest image of a funky cloakroom with the note “this but different”
An old but beloved Roman blind with little stars, that we repurposed into cushions for a child’s bed so this fabric stayed part of the room, even as the scheme was updated around it
A neon name sign to be incorporated into a child’s bedroom
A coloured scallop border around a doorway
NO colour – a teenage room that was specifically to be all done in calming neutrals
Several W&B images on Pinterest. The ultimate flattery!
It might be a colour you’re drawn to, a piece of furniture you can’t part with, a photograph of a room that stopped you in your tracks, a favourite fabric, a painting or even a feeling you want your home to have.
You don’t need to know why you love it, whether it will work in your home or how it fits into the bigger picture. We do that bit.
Those instinctive choices can tell us a surprising amount about your taste. From there, we can start joining the dots and bringing together everything we know about you, your home and the way you want to live with the ideas, materials, makers and products we’ve discovered along the way.
Planning a Project?
Bring us your ideas, however small or unfinished they might be and let us do the legwork from there.